Literature Quotes

The principle of literature is devotion to the particulars of life.

No work of literature is the product of only one or two conscious ideas. A story is mysteriously dense of meaning.

The secret of literature, which conventional people don't guess, is that writers are forever looking for the surprising revelation - not for reinforcement of collective wisdom.

Quoting, like smoking, ... is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then ... I am a professor of English literature; it is an occupational hazard.

Intellectuals of [Albert] Camus' age who had previously disliked him now appreciate him. And at that point we come back to literature, and it's agreed that he was always a great writer.

Life should imitate romance literature far more often.

The Grecian’s maxim would indeed be a sweeping clause in Literature; it would reduce many a giant to a pygmy; many a speech to a sentence; and many a folio to a primer.

Few nations match our rich resource of literature.

We are so very 'umble.

I can't say that I've changed anybody's life, ever, and that's the real work of the world, if you want a better society.

I wasn't a very discriminating reader. I read just about everything that came along.

Alas, if our children lose the crown of life, it will be but a small consolation that they have won the laurels of literature or art.

Truth is not always injured by fiction.

It's really hard when you read literature in a language that's not your own. There are all these cultural references you have to be born into that particular language to get.

I really came to literature through poetry.

I do not actually see how art, literature can be anything other that being in that domain of trying to tell us, trying to get us to see what is important in our lives.

If you want to know about Africa, read our literature - and not just 'Things Fall Apart,' because that would be like saying, 'I've read 'Gone with the Wind' and so I know everything about America.'

When you consider how many millions of workdays begin with hangovers great and small, it is mildly ­surprising to find how few real descriptions of the experience our literature can boast.

More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.

Our points of reference in America aren't steeped in literature; they're steeped in that five minutes between commercials.

I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things

What I tried to do is deliver movies that have worked for me more than once.

One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.

I was in school for literature, and read so many 19th century and early 20th century novels that it was hard to break out of that and read an average Jeanette Winterson book or something.

The core of literature is the idea of tragedy... You don't really learn much from the good things that happen to you.

literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.

Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.

If ideas are what feed serious literature and arresting language, who today is writing a novel of ideas (which can often mean comedy)? I think of Joshua Cohen. Who else?

No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.

God doesn't know things. He is things.

One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one's passional changes.

Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.

I hate England and its hopelessness. I hate [Arnold] Bennett's resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great big kick at misery.

The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more.

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelisthonours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.

Science fiction is the agent provocateur of literature.

I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.

We will always have more to discover, more to invent, more to understand and that's much closer to art and literature than any science.

I completed my first novel when I was 19 years old.

A book begins with an image or character or situation that I care about deeply.

I think I'm very real as a person, and that comes across in my work.

It's hard being visible, so I've made myself invisible.

My early reviews were so bad that I decided I didn't want to read them again.

I don't really need to be inspired by literature though. At the end of the day it's colour and imagery moved around until it works.

Europe was a very contentious subject in literature and yet jazz musicians still depended on Europe. Now it's not such a big deal.

A gene can be either dominant or recessive, depending on which type of gene it is.

I realize that I'm generalizing here, but as is often the case when I generalize, I don't care.